The shooting death in Sanford, Florida, of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin at the hands of 28-year-old George Zimmerman in February 2012 has touched off debate on many issues, including the role of race in both the shooting and the subsequent investigation by the Sanford Police department.

This exercise consists of two student readings. The first reading examines the debate surrounding Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. What is the "Stand Your Ground" law? What do supporters and critics have to say about it? What effect has it had? The second reading takes a wider look at the gun control debate. Should stronger gun control laws be passed? Questions for student discussion follow each reading.

Of the three branches of our government, many believe that the most important is the one directly elected by "We the People": the legislative branch, represented by the two houses of the U.S. Congress at the Capitol building. Join a group of middle schoolers on a tour of Washington, D.C. as they learn about the Constitution and what it means to be "We the People." The "We the People" videos are produced in collaboration with the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.

Students begin this unit by discussing their relationship with art, and the extent to which they believe art drives resistance movements. Students then participate in a Gallery Walk that highlights how members of the Puerto Rico community in the Young Lords used art to advance their ideas and preserve their culture. Students center the activism of Indigenous peoples in Puerto Rico by studying bomba music and murals. This helps them understand the roots of art—both visual and performance—as activism, and respond to the question: How can understanding Latinidad through art help us confront social and political injustices? Throughout this unit, students work in teams to create a poster series that inspires civic engagement and action on issues of social and political injustice.

In the first bend of this unit, students will closely read multiple perspectives on the “American Dream” in
order to collect information to use and integrate that information into an evidence-based perspective.
Students will examine primary and secondary source documents to make informed decisions about
what information to collect that may inspire their writing about “The American Dream.”

In the second bend of this unit, students will engage in a short-research process to create a draft of
argumentative speech on the “American Dream” with a specific purpose, audience, and tone in mind.
They will use their inquiry research questions from bend one to begin analyzing search results and citing
and gathering relevant, accurate, and credible information.

This unit is centered around an anchor text that may be common among content area teachers in a high school setting. Although this unit may be incorporated into any high-school English class, it is aligned with Common Core standards for 9-10. This unit will primarily focus on informational and argumentative texts, and can be used to incorporate more informational texts (as directed by the Common Core) into English classrooms at the high school level. This unit is best suited to a collaborative model of development in which ELA and content area teachers share an anchor text (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and communicate about how to connect diverse skills to common texts and essential questions.

In this video from ThinkTV Dayton, learn about Harriet Beecher Stowe and the basis of her famous book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, that documented racial injustice before the Civil War.

From CK-12, U.S. History Sourcebook - Advanced covers U.S. history from Colonial America through World War I. This book provides high school U.S. History teachers and students with sets of primary and secondary sources about important topics. Some teachers will use it as a supplement to a traditional textbook. For those looking to leave the textbook behind entirely, it will provide a course with basic structure and continuity, and will reduce the burden of finding new primary sources for each class meeting. However, it is not yet comprehensive enough to meet the coverage requirements of, for example, an Advanced Placement test.

These lessons concern the United States Constitution Article 1 concerning the establishment and purpose of the Legislative Branch of the three branches of the US Government.

From CK-12, U.S. History Sourcebook - Basic covers U.S. history from Colonial America through World War I. This book provides high school U.S. History teachers and students with sets of primary and secondary sources about important topics. Some teachers will use it as a supplement to a traditional textbook. For those looking to leave the textbook behind entirely, it will provide a course with basic structure and continuity, and will reduce the burden of finding new primary sources for each class meeting. However, it is not yet comprehensive enough to meet the coverage requirements of, for example, an Advanced Placement test.

This document describes a series of lessons in the Social Sciences, all of which are tied to the exploration of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a Primary Source Document. They are designed to be given to 9th or 10th grade students in a World History, Cultural Geography, or similar social science class. They are specifically designed to teach the Common Core Standards for Literacy in the Social Sciences, and to engage higher order thinking skills.

These short films by Stourwater Pictures are accompanied by activities for classroom and remote teaching and learning about the story of Japanese American WWII exclusion and incarceration on Bainbridge Island and Washington State.

In this project, students research a current or past instance of ethnic or religious conflict from around the world such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Following research, students present and reflect on causes and effects of the conflict. The project was designed for AP Human Geography but can be adapted to any global studies or issues courses.